Foreign Policy

Tillerson Prints Out Trump’s Tweets to Help Set Foreign Policy

When he’s not composing tweets from his bed in the palatial East Wing of the White House, Donald Trump will sometimes dictate his thoughts aloud to an aide. It’s a fitting, if somewhat anomalous, system for a president who is famously tech averse. While Trump has embraced social media—and Twitter in particular—he has never had much use for computers. He eschews e-mail, preferring the phone, and is known to have online articles printed for his perusal. When he doesn’t like a story, he will occasionally write out his critique, by hand, on the printout, and have it mailed to the offending publication, as Vanity Fair can attest.

Back in 2011, Trump wrote that he would dictate his tweets to his executive assistant. More recently, however, the task has fallen to Trump’s former golf caddie, Dan Scavino Jr., now White House director of social media. From there, the tweets go out to some 47 million followers—threatening nuclear war, berating the media, being ignored by Republicans in Congress. Kim Jong Un, a frequent Trump target, has even assigned officials to decipher the messages. “This is very difficult,” one North Korean analyst told The New Yorker last year. “He might be irrational—or too smart. We don’t know.”

Trump’s impulsive, inflammatory tweets have created obvious difficulties for Washington. According to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, however, they are a source of inspiration. While speaking with his predecessor Condoleezza Rice at a Stanford University event on Wednesday, Tillerson—who does not use social media himself—said his aides print out every tweet his boss sends and hand-deliver them to him. “The challenge is just getting caught up because I don’t even have a Twitter account that I can follow what he is tweeting, so my staff usually has to print his tweets out and hand them to me,” Tillerson told Rice. Then the secretary asks himself, “How do we take that and now use it?”

Tillerson’s comments prompted some raised eyebrows, given his own troubled relationship with Trump. In October, the president famously undercut Tillerson’s efforts to negotiate with North Korea, tweeting “Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!” The following month, he declined to consult his advisers before unexpectedly praising Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman’s brutal crackdown on other members of the royal family, leaving Tillerson—once again—out of the loop. Within the State Department, the rumor is that the beleaguered secretary could resign before the end of the month.

On Wednesday, however, Tillerson defended their Twitter-based relationship. “I’ve actually concluded that’s not a bad system,” he insisted. According to the former ExxonMobil C.E.O., the inefficiencies in the process allow him to absorb “the early reactions” to any Trump tweet, which in turn enables him to respond more effectively. Still, Tillerson said, the president’s fondness for Twitter hasn’t changed his own opinion of the platform. “I am probably going to go to my grave and never have a social-media account.”